Beasts
https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/2023/12/beasts/
Italy
https://kenyonreview.org/contributor/arelis-uribe/
City unknown
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/fiction/arelis-uribe-city-unknown/
More translations
https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/belasinfieis/article/view/60216
When I was little, my cousin and I used to kiss each other. We dressed up our Barbies, built houses in the dirt, and played hand games. I stayed at her house every other weekend. We slept in her bed. Sometimes we’d take off our pajama tops and play around, touching our nipples to each other. At the time, they were barely two pink stains on a flat torso. My cousin and I had been together since forever: Our moms got pregnant two months apart. They breastfed us together and changed our diapers together. We got chicken pox together. It almost went without saying that when we grew up, we would live together and play house with dolls, but in real life. I thought it would be me and her, always. But adults mess things up.
There were seven siblings in my mom’s family. Three men and four women. The men lived like the brothers they were. They had studied engineering at the same university, liked the same soccer team, and got together to talk about wine and watches. The four women were a disaster. One left to work in Puerto Montt. We were lucky to see her at Christmas. Another followed a boyfriend and had a bunch of kids and lives in Australia now. She barely existed. The two that stayed—my mom and my cousin’s mom, my Aunt Nena—married brutish men. My dad was an animal and so was my cousin’s dad. Like those people who get drunk on New Year’s and make everyone else cry. I never saw the seven siblings reunited. Sometimes we’d run into each other at funerals or when our grandparents celebrated an anniversary. Once, we went to one of our uncles’ plots of land, and there were peacocks in the yard. Pandora, an enormous mutt who killed our neighbors’ cats, barely fit in our house. I never understood why we lived so differently if we were from the same family.
My mom and my Aunt Nena were similar, which is why they were friends. People tend to group themselves by type, in a voluntary segregation, like blood donations or the recycling. Until one day, I don’t remember why, they got mad at each other. Maybe because my mom asked Aunt Nena for money and never paid it back. Maybe because my aunt came to lunch and criticized the food. I don’t know, but they got mad at each other, and what always happens in a family like mine happened: instead of resolving their problems, they quit speaking. I suppose it was a truce, an act of faith. They trusted that silence would dissolve the problems and that by not naming them, they would cease to exist.
For my cousin and I, the distance happened by extension. The last important thing we shared was that our periods came around the same time. She had taken out a book from I-don’t-know-where that explained everything. It had drawings of a man and a woman without clothes on. We read it. That was the first time we touched like that. We checked to see if we had hair. We were alone in her house. That afternoon, my mom came to get me. She yelled at my Aunt Nena about something I didn’t understand, and we never went back.
At first, I kept going to my cousin’s birthdays. I’d go by myself on the bus because my mom didn’t even want to go near Aunt Nena’s house. I’d call her on the phone too, or we’d send each other letters in the mail. The distance grew little by little. Important things happened to me and I didn’t tell her about them. I had a boyfriend, I got involved with his friend, I kept repeating classes, they hospitalized my little brother, I went to night school for senior year. Maybe she found out anyway, because those kinds of screw-ups get around in families. I heard that she won a literary contest, that her parents separated, that she had a cast on one leg, that she left the scouts because a leader touched her. I also found out when she got into the University of Chile to study journalism. She was the oldest cousin and the news spread fast. My uncles were proud that Nena’s daughter had gotten into their university. My grandfather boasted that there would finally be a true intellectual in the family. He imagined her as a reporter at the Supreme Court or something.
I graduated after senior year and started university prep classes. I worked at a candy shop to pay for it. People cheered me on, as if I’d lost an arm and, with hard work, could recover. As if my disability was being too stupid. I didn’t tell anyone and paid my high school math and language teachers to tutor me. The only thing I wanted was to get into the University of Chile, I didn’t care which major. I wanted to prove I could do it. And I did: I got in to study philosophy. At twenty, I was the oldest student. I had to read a ton. I didn’t like it, but I resolved not to drop classes and to finish however I could.
I knew my cousin and I were on the same campus. Sometimes I wanted to run into her. Other times, I was terrified just thinking about it. One Friday, we were drinking out in the grass, and I saw her pass by. She was gorgeous. Shiny black hair down to her waist; her smooth, dark face; a hippie outfit that showed her midriff. I talked to her, and we hugged each other tight. Our chests touched like when we were kids. She invited me to hang out with her group, and I followed her. We smoked weed and told people about the dumb stuff we did when we were ten: The time we choreographed a whole Michael Jackson routine for her dad’s birthday. The year we sold copies of Sailor Moon books in catechism. The summer we founded an ecology club that cut down live trees to preserve their branches for future generations. I watched her laugh, her teeth, the knowing look in her eyes, like when you go to a club and look at a guy who looks back at you and you know and he knows that you’re looking at each other and why.
After that night, it was as if we were chasing each other. I ran into her a lot. In the humanities library, in the dining hall, on the quad. It was always the same. We talked about when we were kids and a little about the university. We didn’t talk about our moms or our soccer fan uncles or our grandfather’s illness at the time. As if our family was only what happened until the day Aunt Nena yelled at my mom, a breakup that marked a before and an after, as irreversible as the birth of Christ or the invention of writing.
The second semester, we happened to take the same seminar. It was eight classes and I saw her in the first one. She was sitting with a tall, blonde guy who had his arm around her. I sat next to her, because I didn’t know anyone else and to mark my territory, like a dog. Like Pandora, who growled at the people who passed my house. The seminar was about Latin America. Each week an expert on a different country would come and talk. The best part was that after the last class we were going to Bolivia. The coordinating professor wanted the experience to be practical. We were going to confirm that the Bolivians were real people and not details from a book or a deranged mass that allied with Peru in 1800 to force its most unpleasant neighbor into submission.
From the workshop, I concluded that if South America was a neighborhood, Chile would be the upstart neighbor that buys a big car and a tiny dog and always uses a checkbook and credit card. My cousin compared it to the TV show El Chavo and said that Chile was the Quico of the Southern Cone. I didn’t say it, but I thought about our family and felt like my uncles were Chile and her mom and my mom were the loser countries, or a mix between Doña Florinda and Don Ramón: miserable housewives, never able to pay the rent.
I talked with my cousin about the trip to Bolivia. She proposed that we go a week early and stay with a friend she’d met at a poetry reading. We got some money from our grandparents, the university gave us a small travel allowance, and we contributed all our savings. My cousin had been to Peru, but for me, it was the first time outside of Chile. We traveled by bus and got to La Paz at dawn. I pulled back the curtain and looked out the window. I noticed the advertising most. There were posters selling cell phones with company names I’d never seen. Obviously every country has businesses with different names—you even see it in the commercials on cable TV, Omo detergent is called Ala in Argentina—but confirming it affected me. I noticed how I felt like a strange body, discovering that my codes weren’t valid there, even though we shared the same language and the same corner of the continent.
We arrived at the Bolivian friend’s house. It was an old building, next to the United States embassy. The apartment was on the fourth floor and had a parquet floor, three big bedrooms, and some sort of yard. There was an enormous bookcase full of titles by authors I didn’t know. The furniture looked like it was from the last century, like the kind they sell at Persa Biobío: fancy, flashy, inherited. The friend showed us to our room and we threw our sleeping bags on the floor. I was exhausted. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow I’d made, stuffed with a jacket and a pair of pants.
The next day we woke up late. Jessica—that was the friend’s name—had already gone to work. We went out to explore. The neighborhood was very green, with enormous mansions. Kind of like Ñuñoa, around the Juan Gómez Millas campus. I never imagined that there would be places like this in Bolivia. We walked toward downtown and that’s when we started seeing the other houses, the ones we would have lived in if we were born Bolivian. They looked like Brazilian favelas: a bunch of little boxes made of bare bricks, piled one on top of the other, covering the mountain. I thought it was just like Valparaíso, but there the misery goes unnoticed behind colorful paint.
We walked to a cyber café. We called our moms but didn’t say we were together. After checking our email, we read the newspaper a little. Later, my cousin called our grandfather, told him we were doing well, and reminded him to please not say anything. My grandfather—so loving when he was alive—said yes, he was on our side. Daughters, he said, had no reason to interfere in the affairs of granddaughters.
We kept exploring and went to the market. We ate some kind of stew, which cost about 500 Chilean pesos. Not even at university had we eaten food so cheap. We walked off our lunch. On the street we saw boys with hoods over their faces who shined shoes. We saw indigenous women carrying their children on their shoulders, like mother kangaroos, who evolved to carry and protect their young longer. We saw bare feet, police chatting and relaxing, and girls with slanted eyes and the reddest, most weather-beaten cheeks in this impossible place.
That night, Jessica made us coca tea and we sat on her terrace to smoke. I knew she worked as a language teacher in a private Montessori school. I knew what the Montessori method was. I knew that Jessica was one of those Jessicas who had English last names. I knew that in her family, she had a senator uncle and a cousin who had been Miss Bolivia.
Jessica invited us to her boyfriend’s house. We arrived at some kind of party full of white people in an apartment as big as Jessica’s. The people there studied at or used to study at the Catholic University of Bolivia. There was wine and slices of raw squash smeared in sour cream. I tried Paceña and a sweet fruit stuffed with cheese. Things I’d never even eaten at my uncle’s house. Some guy heard that we were Chilean and said we had to hear this story. He said: This happened to two Chilean friends in some kind of whorehouse, one of the ones in the center of Santiago, with the windows painted black. They ordered two cheap drinks. One looked at tits, and the other, asses. Then it was “happy hour”—he made air quotes—and this asshole Chilean, who was obsessed with enormous tits, buried his nose in the server’s cleavage. When he pulled away, he had a mouth full of cracker crumbs.
We laughed. It was a filthy anecdote and repulsive stories are always funny.
Everyone got excited and started telling vulgar stories. I didn’t have any, but my cousin did. She said: One time I went to Machu Picchu with the scouts. A lot of dirty things happened on that trip—she ended the sentence with a long, worried sigh, then continued—I’ll tell you what happened on the bus. From Cuzco to the ruins you have to go up the mountains. It’s a dirt road, full of sharp curves, along a cliff. We paid for the cheapest transportation, some trucks that smelled like the projects, with the seats losing their stuffing. The service came to pick you up at 6:30 on the morning of the camping trip. The night before, the leaders had gone out to eat and, even though it was off limits, to drink. The leader in charge of my group was Carlos, too fat and too much of a pisco lover to be a scout. We got in the van and since it was so early, I fell asleep immediately. I took my shoes off so my feet wouldn’t swell up. I left them on the floor, next to the backpack with my lunch, and I curled up on the seat. I had a dream about the rabid breath of a puma chasing me on Huayna Picchu. He roared so loudly that I woke up. I smelled a bitter odor, like something decomposing. An orange liquid ran under my feet, and it had reached my shoes and backpack. I grabbed my shoes. The laces dripped. I looked back and discovered the roaring was real. It wasn’t the puma, but the leader Carlos. He had drunk so much the night before that when the truck began to zigzag up the hills, his body regurgitated everything. It was disgusting, the scout leader Carlos was disgusting.
When my cousin finished her story, the laughs of the audience were awkward and concerned more than happy. My cousin’s face darkened, too. It made me want to hug her, want to have been with her on that trip. I looked at her clavicle and wanted to smell it. To touch her abdomen with the tip of my nose. I looked at her with eyes like a player in the club, and she winked in return. I wished that house where we were going to live existed. I wanted to fall asleep with our bodies together that night. I wanted her to tell me her secrets, to feel her sweet breath on my face.
By that time of night, Jessica was super drunk. She asked all of us if we wanted to hear something really nasty? She didn’t wait for us to respond (I wanted to say no) and started talking. Her grandfather had been an important Bolivian military man, decorated with medals, his name memorialized in history books. His proudest accomplishment, said Jessica, is that he’s the one who gave the order to kill Che. I can’t remember if she said “El Che” or “Ernesto Che Guevara” or “El Comandante Che Guevara,” but I do remember the awful silence that came after. I never found out if it was the first time she’d told her friends or not. After a few seconds, which were as intense as when you hear a song for the first time, Jessica broke the silence and said: But the really disgusting thing is that we never talk about it in my family.
That sentence killed me. The most disgusting thing is that in my family we never talk about it. I took in the words and looked at my cousin. We were both thinking the same thing, about everything vicious and rotten in silenced family secrets.
After Jessica’s story, the get-together started deflating and people began to say goodbye. Jessica said she wanted to stay at her boyfriend’s place and gave us the keys to her apartment. We walked in the dawn, alone and holding hands, through the streets of a city unknown. Dizzy but strangely happy, we laughed at every stupid thing that crossed our path. A poster for Chinese food with a printed photo of the owner, a pay phone that was too small, the top of a tree that looked like my dad’s head.
We got to the apartment and lay together in the sleeping bags on the floor. My cousin snuggled up next to me and began to shake. Gently at first, more violent later. I touched her face, and it was wet with tears. “He came into my tent, and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to,” she started, repeating those words endlessly, like the soft tap of a hammer. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to.” I brought my nose to her mouth and smelled her breath, as sweet as when we were ten. “I didn’t want to either,” I told her. I took her face in my hands, dried her cheeks, and gave her a kiss, deep and slow. “Me either,” I said again, before hugging her and beginning to cry.
translated from the Spanish by Allison Braden
This story first appeared in Arelis Uribe’s collection Quiltras, published in Chile in 2016 by Los Libros de la Mujer Rota and in Spain in 2019 under the Editorial Tránsito imprint.
Arelis Uribe is a Chilean journalist and writer. In 2016, she published her fiction debut, Quiltras, which won the Chilean Ministry of Culture’s annual prize for best book of short stories and was named one the best Latin American books of the year by the New York Times. In 2017, she published Que explote todo, an anthology of her opinion columns. She was director of communications for Beatriz Sánchez’s presidential campaign and at the feminist organization OCAC, which promoted a law against sexual street harassment in Chile. In 2019, she self-published the zine Cosas que pienso mientras fumo marihuana and founded Editorial Negra, her pocket-format poetry imprint. Currently, she is composing songs and studying for a master’s in creative writing at New York University.
Allison Braden is a writer and translator based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She serves as editor-at-large for Argentina for Asymptote, editorial assistant for the journal Translation & Interpreting Studies, and contributing editor for Charlotte magazine. Her journalism has appeared in The Daily Beast and Columbia Journalism Review, among others. Her interest in cross-cultural communication has led her all over the world, from Bangladesh, where she was a Fulbright fellow in 2014, to Venezuela, where she participated in The Carter Center’s election observation mission after Hugo Chávez’s death. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote and Massachusetts Review, and she is currently seeking publication for her translation of Arelis Uribe’s short story collection, Quiltras.
I’ve always had a problem with Venezuela. An infantile problem, fruit of my disorganized education; a minimal problem; but a problem nonetheless. The center of the problem is of a verbal and geographic nature. It is also probably due to a sort of undiagnosed dyslexia. I don’t mean to say by this that my mother never took me to the doctor; on the contrary, until the age of ten I was an assiduous visitor to doctor’s offices and even hospitals, but from that point on my mother decided I was strong enough to handle anything.
But let us return to the problem. When I was little, I played soccer. My number was 11, the number of Pepe and Zagalo in the World Cup in Sweden, and I was an enthusiastic player but a pretty bad one, though my left leg was my good leg and supposedly lefties never lose steam during a match. In my case, this wasn’t true: I almost always lost steam, though every once in a while, say once every six months, I would play a good match and recover at least a part of the enormous credit lost. At night, as is natural, before going to sleep, I would run circles in my head around my pitiful condition as a soccer player. It was then that I had the first conscious inkling of my dyslexia. I shot with my left leg but wrote with my right hand. That was a fact. I would have liked to write with my left hand, but I did it with my right. And that, right there, was the problem. For instance, when the coach would say, “Pass it to the guy on your right, Bolaño,” I wouldn’t know where to pass the ball. And sometimes, even, playing along the left flank, hearing my coach shout himself hoarse, I would have to stop and think: left—right. Right was the soccer field, left was kicking it out of bounds, out toward the few spectators, children like me, or toward the miserable pastures that surrounded the soccer fields of Quilpue, or Cauquenes, or the province of Bío-Bío. With time, of course, I learned to have a reference every time I was asked or informed about a street that was on the right or the left, and that reference was not the hand with which I wrote but the foot with which I kicked the ball.
And with Venezuela I had, more or less around the same time—meaning until yesterday—a similar problem. The problem was its capital. For me, the most logical thing was for the capital of Venezuela to be Bogotá. And the capital of Colombia, Caracas. Why? Well, by a verbal logic, or a logic of letters. The v in Venezuela is similar, not to say related, to the b in Bogotá. And the c in Colombia is first cousin to the c in Caracas. This seems insubstantial, and it probably is, but for me it constituted a problem of the first order when, on a certain occasion, in Mexico, during a conference about the urban poets of Colombia, I showed up to talk about the potency of the poets of Caracas, and the people—people just as kind and educated as yourselves—remained silent, waiting for me to move beyond the digression about the poets from Caracas and start talking about the ones from Bogotá, but what I did was keep talking about the ones from Caracas, about their aesthetic of destruction. I even compared them to the Italian Futurists—differences notwithstanding, of course—and to the first Lettrists, the group founded by Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, the group out of which the germ of Guy Debord’s Situationism would be born, and the people at this point began to conjecture. I think they must have thought that the poets from Bogotá had made a mass migration to Caracas, or that the poets from Caracas had played a defining role in the new group of poets from Bogotá, and when I finished the talk, abruptly, as I liked to finish any talk those days, the people stood up, applauded timidly, and ran off to consult the poster at the entrance. And as I was leaving, accompanied by the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, who always went around with me and who had surely noticed my mistake, though he didn’t say anything, because for Mario mistakes and errors and equivocations are like Baudelaire’s clouds drifting across the sky, that is to say something to look at but never to correct—on our way out, as I was saying, we ran into an old Venezuelan poet (and when I say “old,” I remember the moment and realize that the Venezuelan poet was probably younger than I am now), who told us with tears in his eyes that there must have been some kind of mistake, that he had never heard a single word about these mysterious poets from Caracas.
At this point in the speech, I get the feeling that don Rómulo Gallegos must be turning over in his grave. “But to whom have they given my prize?” he must be thinking. Forgive me, don Rómulo. It’s just that even doña Bárbara, with a b, sounds like Venezuela and Bogotá, and Bolivar, also, sounds like Venezuela and doña Bárbara. Bolivar and Bárbara, what a good couple they would have made, although don Rómulo’s other two great novels, Cantaclaro and Canaima, could perfectly well be Colombian novels, which leads me to thinking that maybe they are, and that beneath my dyslexia there might perhaps be a method, a bastard semiotic method or a graphological or metasyntactic or phonemic or simply poetic method, and that the truth of truths is that Caracas is the capital of Colombia, just like Bogotá is the capital of Venezuela, in the same way that Bolivar, who is Venezuelan, dies in Colombia, which is also Venezuela and Mexico and Chile.
I don’t know if you can see where I’m trying to get here. Pobre Negro, for instance, by don Rómulo, is an eminently Peruvian
novel. La Casa Verde, by Vargas Llosa, is a Colombo-Venezuelan novel. Terra Nostra, by Fuentes, is an Argentinean novel, though I warn you not to ask me what I’m basing that affirmation on, because the answer would be prolix and boring. The pataphysical academy teaches (and mysteriously, too) the science of imaginary solutions, which, as you all know, is that which studies the laws that regulate exceptions. And this shock in the order of letters is, in a sense, an imaginary problem that requires an imaginary solution.
But let’s return to don Rómulo before we get into Jarry and note a few strange signs along the way. I have just won the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Number 11. I used to play with the number 11 on my shirt. This, to you, will most likely seem a coincidence, but it leaves me trembling. Number 11, who couldn’t tell left from right and thus confused Caracas with Bogotá, has just won (and I use this parenthetical to once again thank the jury for this distinction, in particular Ángeles Mastretta) the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. What would don Rómulo think of this? The other day, talking on the phone, Pere Gimferrer, who is a great poet and on top of that knows everything and has read everything, told me that there are two commemorative plaques in Barcelona marking houses where don Rómulo used to live. According to Gimferrer (although he wouldn’t put his hand in the fire over the particulars), the great Venezuelan writer started writing Canaima in one of these houses.
The truth is that I believe 99.9 percent of the things Gimferrer says to the letter, so, as Gimferrer was talking (one of the houses with the plaques was not a house but a bench, which posits a series of doubts; for instance, if don Rómulo, during his stay in Barcelona—and I say “stay” and not “exile” because a Latin American is never exiled in Spain—had worked on a bench or if the bench later came to install itself in the novelist’s house)… As I was saying, while the Catalan poet was speaking, I got to thinking about my now-distant (though no less exhausting for it, especially in my memory) ambles through the Eixample district, and I saw myself there again, bouncing around in 1977, 1978, maybe 1982, and suddenly I thought I saw a street at sunset, near Muntaner, and I saw a number, the number 11, and then I walked a little further, and there was the plaque. That’s what I saw, in my mind.
But it’s also probable that during the years that I lived in Barcelona, I passed by that street and saw the plaque, a plaque that possibly says, “Here lived Rómulo Gallegos, novelist and politician, born in Caracas in 1884, died in Caracas in 1969,” and then other things, in smaller letters, like his books, accolades, etc. And it’s possible that I would have thought, without stopping, of another famous Colombian writer, though I could have only thought this without stopping, I insist, because by that point I had read don Rómulo as required reading in school in either Chile or Mexico, I can’t remember which, and I liked Doña Bárbara, though, according to Gimferrer, Canaima is better, and of course I knew that don Rómulo was Venezuelan and not Colombian. Which truly signifies very little, being Colombian or being Venezuelan, and at this point we return, as if bounced back by lightning, to the b in Bolivar, who was not dyslexic and who wouldn’t have much minded a united Latin America, a preference
I share with the Liberator, as it’s all the same to me if people say I’m Chilean, even though some Chilean colleagues prefer to see me as Mexican, or if they call me Mexican, though some Mexican colleagues prefer to call me Spanish, or even disappeared in combat. And in fact it’s all the same to me if I’m considered a Spaniard, even if some Spanish colleagues hit the ceiling and start proclaiming I’m from Venezuela, born in Caracas or in Bogotá, which doesn’t bother me much, quite the contrary, in fact.
What’s true is that I am Chilean, and I am also a lot of other things. And having arrived at this point, I must abandon Jarry and Bolivar and try to remember the writer who said that the homeland of a writer is his tongue. I don’t remember his name. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in Spanish. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in English or French. A writer’s homeland, he said, is his tongue. It sounds a little demagogic, but I agree with him completely, and I know that sometimes there is no recourse left us but to get a little demagogic, just like sometimes there is no recourse left us but to dance a bolero under the light of streetlamps or a red moon. Although it’s also true that a writer’s homeland is not his tongue, or not only his tongue, but also the people he loves. And sometimes a writer’s homeland is not the people he loves but his memory. And other times a writer’s only homeland is his loyalty, and his courage. In truth, a writer’s homelands can be many, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends a great deal on whatever he is writing at the moment. The homelands can be many, it occurs to me now, but the passport can only be one, and that passport is evidently the quality of his writing. Which does not mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing marvelously well, and not even that, because anyone can write marvelously well, too. What, then, is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one’s head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food. And to accept that fact, though sometimes it may weigh on us more than the flagstone that covers the remains of every dead writer. Literature, as an Andalusian folk song might say, is dangerous.
And now that I have returned, finally, to the number 11, which is the number of those who run along the flanks, and now that I have mentioned danger, I recall that page of the Quijote where the merits of arms and letters are discussed, and I suppose that, in the end, what is being discussed is the difference in the level of danger, which also means the level of virtue, entailed in each occupation. And Cervantes, who was a soldier, has arms win out over letters, has the soldier win out over the honorable occupation of the poet. And if we read these pages well (something that now, as I write this speech, I am not doing, even though from the table at which I sit I can see my two editions of the Quijote), we will sense in them a strong aroma of melancholy, because Cervantes is having his own youth triumph, the ghost of his lost youth, before the reality of his exercise of prose and poetry, which until then had been so adverse. And this comes to my mind because to a great extent everything that I have ever written is a love letter or a letter of farewell to my own generation, those of us who were born in the ’50s and who chose at a given moment to take up arms (though in this case it would be more correct to say “militancy”) and gave the little that we had, or the greater thing that we had, which was our youth, to a cause that we believed to
be the most generous of the world’s causes and that was, in a sense, though in truth it wasn’t.
Needless to say, we fought tooth and nail, but we had corrupt bosses, cowardly leaders, an apparatus of propaganda that was worse than that of a leper colony. We fought for parties that, had they emerged victorious, would have immediately sent us to a forced-labor camp. We fought and poured all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for over fifty years, and some of us knew that: How were we not going to know that if we had read Trotsky or were Trotskyites? But nevertheless we did it, because we were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return. And now nothing is left of those young people, those who died in Bolivia, died in Argentina or in Peru, and those who survived went to Chile or Mexico to die, and the ones they didn’t kill there they killed later in Nicaragua, in Colombia, in El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten youths. And this is what moves Cervantes to choose arms over letters. His companions, too, were dead. Or old and abandoned, in misery and neglect. To choose was to choose youth, to choose the defeated and those who had nothing left. And that is what Cervantes does, he chooses youth. And even in this melancholy weakness, in this crack in his soul, Cervantes is the most lucid, for he knows that writers don’t need anyone to praise their occupation. We praise it ourselves.
Frequently, our way of praising it is to curse the hour in which we decided to become writers, but as a general rule we tend to clap and dance when we’re alone, for this is a solitary occupation, and we recite our own pages to ourselves, and that is our way of praising ourselves, and we don’t need for anyone to tell us what we have to do and much less for a poll to elect ours as the most honorable of occupations. Cervantes, who wasn’t dyslexic but who was left crippled by the exercise of arms, knew perfectly well what he was saying. Literature is a dangerous occupation.
Which takes us directly to Alfred Jarry, who had a gun and liked to shoot, and to the number 11, the leftmost extreme, which looks out of the corner of its eye as it passes like a bullet by the plaque and the house where don Rómulo lived. And I hope that at this point in the speech don Rómulo is not so angry with me, that he won’t appear to Domingo Miliani in dreams asking why they gave me the prize that bears his name, a prize that for me is hugely important—I am the first Chilean to obtain it—a prize that doubles the challenge, as if that were possible, as if the challenge by its very nature, by its own virtues, weren’t already doubled or tripled. A prize, by this reasoning, would seem a gratuitous act, and now that I think about it, since this is all true, a prize does have something of the gratuitous in it. It is a gratuitous act that does not speak to my novel or its merits but to the generosity of a jury. (Until yesterday, I did not know any of its members.) Let this be clear, because like Cervantes’s veterans of Lepanto and like the veterans of the Latin-American Florid Wars, my only wealth is my dignity. I read this and I don’t believe it. Me, talking about dignity. It’s possible that the spirit of don Rómulo won’t appear in dreams to Domingo Miliani but to me.
These words are written now, in Caracas (Venezuela), and one thing is clear: Don Rómulo can’t appear to me in dreams for the simple reason that I can’t sleep. Outside, the crickets are chirping. I calculate, very roughly, that there are some ten or twenty thousand of them. Perhaps don Rómulo’s voice is in one of their songs, confused, joyfully confused, in the Venezuelan night, in the American night, in the night that belongs to all of us, to those who sleep and to those of us who can’t.
I feel like Pinocchio.
Translated by David Noriega,
The first complete English translation of the Chilean novelist's 1999 speech accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize.
